I want to emphasize that the following article is supposed to be satirical (the author emphasizes that point several times during the article), though many of the points he makes are not satirical.
This article is also a reminder to conspiracy mongers who believe that the all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent CIA is behind everything that goes on in the world — or at least in your part of the world — well, forget about it. Satire and reality are not part of your universe.
I also want to emphasize that almost all his criticism is directed at the CIA, although he takes a swing or two at the intelligence community as a whole. Note also that he is suggesting that the U.S. government should outsource the CIA, not the entire intelligence community.
Actually, he's a bit late in suggesting outsourcing of the CIA or any other intelligence agencies. Approximately three-quarters of the 100,000-plus people who work in the intelligence community are contractors. In my humble opinion, we've gone too far in terms of outsourcing intelligence responsibilities, functions, and activities that are and should be considered inherently governmental. But that's another story.
On the other hand, the idea that investigative reporters could do a better job than many CIA analysts and agents does have more than a little merit. On the other other hand, those former reporters will probably find that they haven't escaped dysfunctional management and bureaucratic politics just because they've left the newsroom. They may have just leaped from the frying pan into the fire.
But remember — the following article is a satire...
Outsource the CIA to Downsized Reporters
By Ron Rosenbaum
Slate.com
January 22, 2010
It's rare that one is able to solve two profoundly troubling societal problems with one quick fix, but I feel I've done it! Well, in a metaphorical, Swiftian, satirical "Modest Proposal" way. I suspect that most Slate readers will be aware that Jonathan Swift's 18th-century "Modest Proposal" to solve the Irish famine by encouraging starving parents to eat their children was meant as satire, right? Because when I ran my own modest proposal by a journalist friend, she took it a little too seriously, and heatedly informed me, "That's the worst idea I ever heard!" That's sort of the point! When things are bad, the only way to make the situation crystal-clear is to show how difficult it would be to come up with an idea that is ludicrously worse.
On the other hand, as they say in cheesy movies, "Sounds crazy, but it just might work!"
So: My modest proposal to solve America's "intelligence" failures is to fire the entire CIA and our other many tragically inept intelligence agencies and outsource all intelligence operations to investigative reporters downsized by the collapse of the newspaper business. Thereby improving our "intelligence capability" (it can't possibly get worse!) and giving a paycheck to some worthy and skilled investigative types — yes, some sketchy, crazed, paranoid (but in a colorful, obsessive, yet often highly effective way) reporters who once made the journalism profession proud, exciting, and useful, not boring stenography for the power elites.
How bad are things in U.S. intelligence? I refer you to a Jan. 20 Reuters report on the Congressional investigation into the failure to "connect the dots" on the Christmas bomber: the guy who — as just about everybody in the world except U.S. intelligence knew — was trying to blow up a plane. Why?
A senior counterterrorism official said on Wednesday his agency lacks "Google-like" search capability that could have identified the suspect in the attempted Christmas Day airline bombing.
The National Counterterrorism Center, the agency charged with reviewing disparate data to protect against attacks, does not have a computer search engine that could have checked for various spellings of the alleged bomber's name and his birthplace in Nigeria, the center's chief told a Senate hearing on security reform. "We do not have that exact capacity," said Michael Leiter, adding that the agency is working on solutions that could be in place within weeks.
Don't you love "that exact capacity"? Sort of trying to say they almost have the capacity but not ... exactly. Remember the Hertz commercial in which a junior exec gets some loser car and has to say that it's "not exactly" what he could have gotten from Hertz? I see Michael Leiter pulling up in a DayGlo-painted clown car, his crack team of Google-like computer experts in full clown makeup emerging with their Commodore 64s at the ready saying, "We almost identified the would-be terror bomber, but ... not exactly."
That's the Michael Leiter, by the way, who is our Supreme Chief of Connecting the Dots in our gazillionith reorganization of U.S. intelligence. Yes, that would be the same Michael Leiter who decided after the Christmas bombing attempt to proceed with his previously booked ski vacation. Hey, the "Google-like" capacity wouldn't be available for weeks, so why not spend some cozy time at a ski resort with all the fixings, maybe even some after-dinner Pong or Donkey Kong.
Why this guy hasn't been summarily fired, not just for the vacation (hope the trails were fluffy!) but for the lack of a "Google-like" search capacity for U.S. intelligence is baffling to anyone with any intelligence. And I think it's sufficient evidence that my modest proposal should be taken more seriously. After thinking about my proposal for a few days during my ski vacation, I've come up with some bells and whistles for it.
I wouldn't stop with firing our entire intelligence team (leave behind the slide rules, though, will you guys, before you turn out the lights — or blow out the candles?) and outsourcing their jobs to downsized print journalists. I'd include the unfairly down-played and down-market wings of media that get no respect, like The Enquirer. (Who knew Hugo Chavez had a love child?) I'd enlist the legion of bloggers and even celebrity-gossip Web sites to join in my new U.S. intelligence team. Do you have any doubt that it would take TMZ less than 48 hours to come up with an (alleged) Mullah Omar sex tape? Or for Gawker Stalker to spot OBL at a Kandahar bazaar. Or for Page Six to get the details on the "gymnastic" skills of Vladimir Putin's 20-somethng hottie and link her somehow to Tila Tequila?
I know: J-school ethicists wouldn't approve of this, and I agree with Glenn Greenwald's argument that journalists shouldn't get mixed up in government business, and I've practiced what I preached. (I once turned down a CIA offer to deliver a lecture about Hitler and the nature of evil at their Langley headquarters.) But, hey, do I need to reiterate that this is a "modest proposal" satire remember.
And I wouldn't limit my recruitment to the new CIA (renamed the Creative Intelligence Agency) to just the downsized. Why not unleash some of the still-employed fearsome legends of investigative reporting, like Sy Hersh or Jane Mayer, on our nation's foes? They invariably have ways of outsmarting the CIA's rudimentary secrecy protections, publishing leaks from inside sources. The warrantless wiretaps, the "black flight" illegal renditions of suspects to torture-friendly countries, the "enhanced interrogation" torture program itself, you name it — if the CIA's got a secret, the New York Times and the Washington Post have it a day later.
These reporters have managed to infiltrate the CIA far better than the CIA has infiltrated any terrorist organization. The CIA has compiled a history of failure so replete with lethal blunders that even when a self-proclaimed mole within al-Qaida told them he could get al-Qaida's No. 2 man, al-Zawahiri, they credulously and, alas, tragically got the go-ahead to trust him and ended up losing seven lives because they were so eager to end their relentless run of defeats.
Newsmen have taken such a beating lately from the likes of corporate consultant-racket profiteers such as Jeff Jarvis, who get paid handsomely to tell the executive drones who hire them as consultants that the collapse of the newspaper industry wasn't their fault. No, it was somehow the fault of the reporters they had to fire to maintain their perks, so that these execs don't have to carry anything on their conscience about it. Just keep paying Jeff to tell them fairy tales about the future, and someday they'll find an online business model that really, really works (for Jeff, anyway).
Indeed, my modest proposal might be a morale booster to show the world just how resourceful and skillful and "creative" U.S. reporters can be. I'm not suggesting a Pulitzer Prize for spying. Maybe a Congressional Medal of Honor though. (Kidding!)
Let's face it: The only good secrets our intelligence agencies have are quickly scooped up and published by ace investigative reporters. In fact, any group of people randomly selected from the phone book (or Facebook) could have compiled a better record than our intelligence agencies over the past half-century. They've made us a laughingstock.
Do I need to recount the dismal, abysmal, horrible, very bad record of U.S. intelligence agencies over the past half-century? They may as well have been run by our worst enemies. (Indeed, some paranoia-inclined analysts believe they were run by double agents and moles, but my inclination is to follow the maxim: "Never believe in conspiracies when sheer incompetence provides an explanation.")
You want to see incompetence? Look at the record (or read Tim Weiner's encyclopedic compilation of CIA failures, Legacy of Ashes, for a start). After their hall-of-fame-worthy bungling of the Bay of Pigs, CIA incompetents almost got us into a global nuclear holocaust over the Cuban Missile Crisis, when they assured the Pentagon in October 1962 that the Russians had not yet armed their nukes in Cuba. This turned out to be totally false: The nukes were assembled, armed, and aimed, and Khrushchev had given operational control to Castro already, so that the invasion the Joint Chiefs almost talked JFK into would have almost certainly been an instant Armageddon. Heckuva job, Langley!
Then there's the endemic problem with "connecting the dots" — which dates back to the veritable dot matrix that Lee Harvey Oswald presented, one that the CIA ignored (or siloed as the fashionable new management jargon has it). After all, consider Oswald: a guy who defects to the Soviet Union proclaiming his belief in communism and hatred of America, then redefects to the United States, where he gets deeply involved in violent post-Bay of Pigs CIA-financed intrigue, proceeds to threatens an FBI man who tries to question him, buys a rifle, and happens to work within gun scope range of the presidential motorcade. Nothing much here for the CIA to be concerned about or communicate to the Secret Service watch list, right?
Did all of this have something to do with the CIA being run by elite, WASP, Skull and Bones types who were pitifully easy marks for the darker-skinned people they were trying to control? Yes. But there was also a kind of Higher Stupidity at the CIA that masked itself as "complexity."
You can see this in the whole "molehunt" madness initiated by legendary (for paranoid delusion) James Jesus Angleton, the chief of the CIA's counter intelligence division for two misbegotten decades, who was made a fool of by Kim Philby, the British KGB operative who was perhaps the most obvious mole in history but who appealed to Angleton's Anglophilia, a pathology of most of the upper-class twits who ran the CIA from the beginning. After Philby made a fool of him, Angleton went mad, turned the CIA into a place where the paranoid inmates ran the asylum in their insane hunt for a nonexistent mole, a foolish crusade that utterly paralyzed the agency's chief mission: spying on the Soviets. And so at the height of the Cold War, the CIA had no intelligence it trusted about the Soviets.
Then, when it turned out there were no CIA moles during Angleton's watch, his hypervigilance discredited ordinary, rational vigilance and allowed a blundering creep like Aldrich Ames, a real mole, to steal every secret the CIA had for Soviet cash and cause the death of an untold number of our operatives in Moscow.
And then there was the Team A/Team B fiasco, another profoundly dangerous screw-up. It wasn't a bad idea in theory. George H.W. Bush, head of the CIA under President Ford, was persuaded that there was doubt about CIA estimates of Soviet missile progress, doubt raised by perennial "missile gap" alarmists. He appointed a team of outside "experts" to investigate and offer an alternative analysis, beyond the agency's.
They became known as "Team B" to the CIA's in-house "Team A," and they produced what turned out to be a totally inaccurate overestimate of Soviet capabilities and intentions. (See Cold War historian Pavel Podvig's demolition of Team B's conclusions in the light of history.) Nonetheless, in a kind of forerunner to the WMD fiasco, Team B's paranoid analysis became the basis for the $1 trillion arms buildup during the Reagan administration to match the Soviet's illusory gains. Paradoxically, Team B's overestimation and the insane overspending that resulted may have made them a key factor in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union. The CIA's stunning record of ineptness led to Team B's epoch-making mistake. As Dylan wrote, "There's no success like failure." Though, he added, "Failure's no success at all."
The CIA's post Cold War failures are all too well-known from the WMD fiasco. (CIA head George Tenet famously told the president it was "a slam dunk" they were there. Maybe by "slam dunk" he was thinking of water-boarding and other supereffective "enhanced interrogation" methods that were shamefully adopted by the intelligence community.) And, of course, the entire intelligence community had a hand in producing the now-discredited 2007 National Intelligence estimate on the Iranian nuclear weapons program, which left the credulous media with the impression: nuthin' goin' on.
A record like that, an unprecedented, massive, relentless record of failure deserves only one response: accountability. We've got to fire them all. At the very least, this action would say that failure won't be the new normal forever. But who to replace them with? And who to handle the transition?
My modest proposal may have been engendered by rereading something I wrote a while ago in Harper's ("The Shadow of the Mole," October 1983, subscription only) about the whole Angleton mole madness which mentioned a little noticed Washington conference on "intelligence," sponsored by a shadowy group called "The Consortium for the Study of Intelligence." The conference produced a volume, Intelligence Requirements for the 1980s. In it was a paper by veteran espionage journalist (and Slate contributor) Edward Jay Epstein, who I think should play a key role in managing the transition after we fire the CIA en masse.
Epstein's essay had the forbidding academic-sounding title "Incorporating Analysis of Foreign Governments' Deception Into the U.S. Analytical System." But buried within it was an important distinction between "Type A Deception," which involved manipulation of foreign governments' perception of our overt behavior, and "Type B Deception," which "purports to emanate from the highest levels of decision making" — and might involve journalists staging deception — giving the foe a false impression of our secret, esoteric strategy. I'm not doing its complexity justice.
But there was a key passage in the essay that startled me because it broke out of the gray, bureaucratic prose of most of the volume to raise an imaginative, even cinematic idea: a "Type B Deception" team. "It might conceivably employ functional paranoids, confidence men, magicians, film scenarists or whomever seemed appropriate to simulate whatever deception plots seemed plausible."
"Functional paranoids?" "Confidence men." He might as well be describing the mind and character of our better investigative reporters! I'm not strictly an investigative reporter myself, though I've done a lot of it, and I know a lot of them and I think I know the mind-set. They'd be a perfect fit for replacing our discredited intelligence community.
My first step would be to contact the IRE (the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization) and see whether we can scare up some volunteers. Then I'd ask Ed to be my (wartime) consigliore. We will save America from its external enemies! We will end abusive practices and endless bungles! We will put the dangerous, worse-than-useless CIA out to pasture.
That's my modest proposal.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The curse of Muslim lands (and my comments)
Too much innocent blood has been spilled in the name of Islam. It is time the madness came to an end, writes Aijaz Zaka Syed.
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
21-27 January 2010
Terrorism, they say, is the weapon of the weak. But in our case it has become the weapon against the weak. The use of suicide is not something invented by Muslims. It's perhaps as old as homicide. Japan's harakiri comes to mind. But perhaps no people have suffered from it, and because of it, as much as Muslims have in recent years.
So what drives a suicide bomber? And what kind of cause, however noble, makes you kill innocent people peacefully going about their day-to-day business — people who haven't harmed anyone and pose no threat to anyone? And how can these faceless men, whatever their motives, ever think they would be forgiven, let alone rewarded, in the next life for their despicable acts against the defenceless?
Is this what Islam really preaches and stands for? If not — as we all know it doesn't — why aren't our religious scholars, leaders and wise men raising a storm and doing more to stop these mad men bent on tarnishing the image of a noble faith and its billion plus followers?
I have struggled with these questions every time innocent people are killed in a terror attack or suicide bombing. And these questions have been troubling me again since the mind-numbing attacks on a Muharram procession in Karachi and a volleyball match in Pakistan's north last week.
The unparalleled scale of the attack on the Ashura procession in Karachi — Pakistan's financial/commercial capital and political nerve centre — has shaken a country that has long been used to daily mayhem of this kind. Nearly 50 people were killed and 500 injured in the Karachi attack. But more than the loss of lives, it is the devastation wreaked on the country's biggest city that day that will haunt Pakistan for a long time to come.
Thousands of businesses, shops and commercial establishments were destroyed in no time, incurring losses worth billions of dollars. And the attack on the heavily attended volleyball match in the troubled Northwest killed 75 villagers, and left scores maimed.
None of those watching the match or attending the Muharram procession had anything to do with the Western wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan or Iraq. They had no sympathy or affiliation whatsoever with the United States and the West. Then why have they been targeted? More importantly, what have the planners and perpetrators of these devastating attacks against unsuspecting bystanders achieved?
But whoever said there is any higher purpose or noble objective behind all this madness? There's no method in the madness. This is an all-consuming monster that does not distinguish between friends and foes. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound, more Muslims than non-Muslims have been killed in macabre attacks carried out in the name of Islam.
As regular readers would know, this humble hack has been doing his bit — for what it's worth — to question, critique and confront the big powers have been playing in the Middle East and Arab/Muslim world for centuries, and has gone to great lengths to point out repeatedly why US and Western policies are to blame for much of the mess you see in the Muslim world today, from Palestine to Pakistan.
I have also religiously underscored the fact that groups like Al-Qaeda have been birthed and fuelled by Western double standards and unjust, callous policies in the Muslim world. And that even in the face of increasing threats from extremist groups and evidence of a clear link between cause and effect, the West has tenaciously refused to address, review and change its fundamental policies in the greater Middle East region. But that's another story altogether.
Western actions cannot be an excuse for the kind of extremist violence that is being visited on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Why are innocent people — almost all of them Muslims — being made to pay for Western policies and sins? And how does it help the "cause" of these so-called defenders of Islam when they target innocent Muslims, and non-Muslims for that matter? This death cult is the ultimate injustice and calumny against a faith that celebrates peace, reason, moderation and justice in all spheres. Why, Islam literally means peace!
So what kind of Islam do these lunatics think they believe in when they send young, impressionable 13-year-olds who haven't even experienced what life is to die? The Karachi attack and the terror strike on the volleyball match are only the most recent instances of crimes committed in the name of a great faith. Pakistan's recent history, and that of the Middle East, is replete with such vile and craven crimes against humanity.
Tens of thousands of innocent Muslims — and non-Muslims — have died in this mindless violence targeting bazaars, mosques, schools, hospitals... you name it. True, the self-styled "coalition of the willing" has visited a great deal of horror on Iraq and Afghanistan. But we are not any less injured by nihilists who kill and murder with impunity in our name.
Let's face it: Some of the worst crimes against Muslims have been committed in the name of Islam by people who claim to be our defenders and champions. In fact, they are worse than the West because they pretend to be our friends and allies before they hunt us from within.
If the invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan are not our friends, the folks who live in our midst to kill us from within like a cancer are not our friends either. This is the reality Muslims have to confront, and confront it now, before it's too late. And this is the message we have to send across Muslim lands and around the world.
I do not know how many people, especially Muslims, paid attention to this year's hajj sermon. Addressing the white sea of three million pilgrims from around the world in Mecca, and by extension the larger Muslim world, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al-Sheikh used unusually strong language to draw attention to the issue that has become the bane of the Islamic world.
While Islamic scholars, including those leading prayers at the most sacred mosque on the planet, have been talking about the growing cult of the suicide bomber and warning against extremism, this is the first time anyone has condemned the menace with such force and in such unequivocal terms. Warning Muslims around the world against the extremists, the grand mufti termed the spectre of terror and suicide attacks as "the curse of Muslim lands". He singled out the extremism and the death cult of suicide attacks as the "most serious problem" facing the Muslim community today.
This is the message that has to be taken far and wide with the force and conviction with which it was delivered. This is a matter of life and death, literally. Religious scholars, politicians, intellectuals, the media and ordinary Muslims have to come together, deploying all resources and means at their disposal to free ourselves of this stigma distorting the real, pristine image of Islam before the world.
Too much innocent blood has been spilled and too many innocents have died in the name of our faith. It's time to say enough is enough! Please, not in our name! For God's sake, not in our name!
Aijaz Zaka Syed is opinion editor of Khaleej Times (Dubai, UAE).
Mark says:
The attack in Karachi, Pakistan on an ‘Ashura (Shi’ite holy day) procession was attributed to Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, two of the most extremist Sunni Salafi (fundamentalist) groups in Pakistan. Their attack on Shi'ites was part of the civil war that is going on in the Islamic world — between extremists and those whom they regard as apostates (non-extremists) and between Sunni extremists and those they regard as infidels (Shi'ites). I'm simplifying here, but I could write an article or a book (many have already done so) on these conflicts.
In any case, members of groups like Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi consider Shi'ites to be worse than Christians and even worse than Jews. In fact, some of their ideological rants claim that Shi'ites are either crypto-Jews or allied with Jews in the "World Jewish Conspiracy" to control the world and destroy Islam. The bottom line is that, unlike Aijaz Zaka Syed (who is originally from India), they do not consider Shi’ites to be Muslims and, therefore, they are prime targets.
With all due respect to Mr. Syed, I have to take issue with his assertion that “Islam literally means peace!” It is true that the root of Islam — S-L-M — is also the same root as the word SaLāM, which means peace in Arabic. However, the word Islām — as a word — literally means “submission or resignation or surrender to the will of God” and one who does so is a muSLiM.
The implication that Islām means peace comes from classical Islamic law, which divided the world into dār al-Islām (the house or abode of Islam) and dār al-harb (the house or abode of war). Dār al-Islām was the part of the world that was under Islamic rule or control. It was assumed as a matter of course by the theologians and jurists that, by definition, anyplace that came under Islamic rule or control would be an “abode of peace,” which is how the implication that Islam “literally means peace” developed. Even a cursory survey of Islamic history demonstrates that peace was more often the exception than the rule.
In classical Islamic law, dār al-harb was, by definition, in a state of ignorance and chaos that must be brought under Islamic control to bring peace. It justified the initial Arab conquests of the Byzantine and Persian empires which, in another context, were nothing more than imperial and colonialist conquests similar to those that had preceded them (see, e.g., the Greeks and Romans) and which succeeded them (see, e.g., the British and the French). It justified conquests of the Arab Muslim kingdoms in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa by the Turks (first the Seljuks and then the Ottomans). It justified the Mughal conquest of much of India. And it justified the wars between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shi’ite Safavid and Qajar Empires.
Discussions about dār al-Islām and dār al-harb are an obsession of the Salafists and those who sympathize with some or many of their aims. But, as Mr. Syed implies, it is not of great concern to the majority of Muslims, who have less esoteric concerns and more basic priorities.
It should have been obvious when suicide bombers or “martyrdom operations” started in the early 1980s against Israeli, U.S., and then other Western targets (and which started out as a Shi’ite weapon before it was later adopted by Sunni Muslim extremists) that it would eventually — and inevitably — be turned against fellow Muslims. Of course, those “fellow Muslims” would be regarded as “heretics” or “apostates” or “collaborators” — so they weren’t really “fellow Muslims.” It’s a problem when theology is turned into ideology.
Finally — just so you don’t forget — my point in posting this article was to bring to my readers’ attention an example of a Muslim naysayer — and not an obscure one — to the violence that is going on in the Muslim world, and the growing realization — as exemplified by the Grand Mufti of Mecca's hajj sermon, that the djinn (genie) must be put back in the bottle before it destroys the Muslim world. There is a great danger when we generalize — that includes what I have written here.
Al-Ahram Weekly (Egypt)
21-27 January 2010
Terrorism, they say, is the weapon of the weak. But in our case it has become the weapon against the weak. The use of suicide is not something invented by Muslims. It's perhaps as old as homicide. Japan's harakiri comes to mind. But perhaps no people have suffered from it, and because of it, as much as Muslims have in recent years.
So what drives a suicide bomber? And what kind of cause, however noble, makes you kill innocent people peacefully going about their day-to-day business — people who haven't harmed anyone and pose no threat to anyone? And how can these faceless men, whatever their motives, ever think they would be forgiven, let alone rewarded, in the next life for their despicable acts against the defenceless?
Is this what Islam really preaches and stands for? If not — as we all know it doesn't — why aren't our religious scholars, leaders and wise men raising a storm and doing more to stop these mad men bent on tarnishing the image of a noble faith and its billion plus followers?
I have struggled with these questions every time innocent people are killed in a terror attack or suicide bombing. And these questions have been troubling me again since the mind-numbing attacks on a Muharram procession in Karachi and a volleyball match in Pakistan's north last week.
The unparalleled scale of the attack on the Ashura procession in Karachi — Pakistan's financial/commercial capital and political nerve centre — has shaken a country that has long been used to daily mayhem of this kind. Nearly 50 people were killed and 500 injured in the Karachi attack. But more than the loss of lives, it is the devastation wreaked on the country's biggest city that day that will haunt Pakistan for a long time to come.
Thousands of businesses, shops and commercial establishments were destroyed in no time, incurring losses worth billions of dollars. And the attack on the heavily attended volleyball match in the troubled Northwest killed 75 villagers, and left scores maimed.
None of those watching the match or attending the Muharram procession had anything to do with the Western wars in Afghanistan-Pakistan or Iraq. They had no sympathy or affiliation whatsoever with the United States and the West. Then why have they been targeted? More importantly, what have the planners and perpetrators of these devastating attacks against unsuspecting bystanders achieved?
But whoever said there is any higher purpose or noble objective behind all this madness? There's no method in the madness. This is an all-consuming monster that does not distinguish between friends and foes. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound, more Muslims than non-Muslims have been killed in macabre attacks carried out in the name of Islam.
As regular readers would know, this humble hack has been doing his bit — for what it's worth — to question, critique and confront the big powers have been playing in the Middle East and Arab/Muslim world for centuries, and has gone to great lengths to point out repeatedly why US and Western policies are to blame for much of the mess you see in the Muslim world today, from Palestine to Pakistan.
I have also religiously underscored the fact that groups like Al-Qaeda have been birthed and fuelled by Western double standards and unjust, callous policies in the Muslim world. And that even in the face of increasing threats from extremist groups and evidence of a clear link between cause and effect, the West has tenaciously refused to address, review and change its fundamental policies in the greater Middle East region. But that's another story altogether.
Western actions cannot be an excuse for the kind of extremist violence that is being visited on Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Why are innocent people — almost all of them Muslims — being made to pay for Western policies and sins? And how does it help the "cause" of these so-called defenders of Islam when they target innocent Muslims, and non-Muslims for that matter? This death cult is the ultimate injustice and calumny against a faith that celebrates peace, reason, moderation and justice in all spheres. Why, Islam literally means peace!
So what kind of Islam do these lunatics think they believe in when they send young, impressionable 13-year-olds who haven't even experienced what life is to die? The Karachi attack and the terror strike on the volleyball match are only the most recent instances of crimes committed in the name of a great faith. Pakistan's recent history, and that of the Middle East, is replete with such vile and craven crimes against humanity.
Tens of thousands of innocent Muslims — and non-Muslims — have died in this mindless violence targeting bazaars, mosques, schools, hospitals... you name it. True, the self-styled "coalition of the willing" has visited a great deal of horror on Iraq and Afghanistan. But we are not any less injured by nihilists who kill and murder with impunity in our name.
Let's face it: Some of the worst crimes against Muslims have been committed in the name of Islam by people who claim to be our defenders and champions. In fact, they are worse than the West because they pretend to be our friends and allies before they hunt us from within.
If the invaders of Iraq and Afghanistan are not our friends, the folks who live in our midst to kill us from within like a cancer are not our friends either. This is the reality Muslims have to confront, and confront it now, before it's too late. And this is the message we have to send across Muslim lands and around the world.
I do not know how many people, especially Muslims, paid attention to this year's hajj sermon. Addressing the white sea of three million pilgrims from around the world in Mecca, and by extension the larger Muslim world, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdel-Aziz Al-Sheikh used unusually strong language to draw attention to the issue that has become the bane of the Islamic world.
While Islamic scholars, including those leading prayers at the most sacred mosque on the planet, have been talking about the growing cult of the suicide bomber and warning against extremism, this is the first time anyone has condemned the menace with such force and in such unequivocal terms. Warning Muslims around the world against the extremists, the grand mufti termed the spectre of terror and suicide attacks as "the curse of Muslim lands". He singled out the extremism and the death cult of suicide attacks as the "most serious problem" facing the Muslim community today.
This is the message that has to be taken far and wide with the force and conviction with which it was delivered. This is a matter of life and death, literally. Religious scholars, politicians, intellectuals, the media and ordinary Muslims have to come together, deploying all resources and means at their disposal to free ourselves of this stigma distorting the real, pristine image of Islam before the world.
Too much innocent blood has been spilled and too many innocents have died in the name of our faith. It's time to say enough is enough! Please, not in our name! For God's sake, not in our name!
Aijaz Zaka Syed is opinion editor of Khaleej Times (Dubai, UAE).
Mark says:
The attack in Karachi, Pakistan on an ‘Ashura (Shi’ite holy day) procession was attributed to Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, two of the most extremist Sunni Salafi (fundamentalist) groups in Pakistan. Their attack on Shi'ites was part of the civil war that is going on in the Islamic world — between extremists and those whom they regard as apostates (non-extremists) and between Sunni extremists and those they regard as infidels (Shi'ites). I'm simplifying here, but I could write an article or a book (many have already done so) on these conflicts.
In any case, members of groups like Tehreek-i-Taliban and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi consider Shi'ites to be worse than Christians and even worse than Jews. In fact, some of their ideological rants claim that Shi'ites are either crypto-Jews or allied with Jews in the "World Jewish Conspiracy" to control the world and destroy Islam. The bottom line is that, unlike Aijaz Zaka Syed (who is originally from India), they do not consider Shi’ites to be Muslims and, therefore, they are prime targets.
With all due respect to Mr. Syed, I have to take issue with his assertion that “Islam literally means peace!” It is true that the root of Islam — S-L-M — is also the same root as the word SaLāM, which means peace in Arabic. However, the word Islām — as a word — literally means “submission or resignation or surrender to the will of God” and one who does so is a muSLiM.
The implication that Islām means peace comes from classical Islamic law, which divided the world into dār al-Islām (the house or abode of Islam) and dār al-harb (the house or abode of war). Dār al-Islām was the part of the world that was under Islamic rule or control. It was assumed as a matter of course by the theologians and jurists that, by definition, anyplace that came under Islamic rule or control would be an “abode of peace,” which is how the implication that Islam “literally means peace” developed. Even a cursory survey of Islamic history demonstrates that peace was more often the exception than the rule.
In classical Islamic law, dār al-harb was, by definition, in a state of ignorance and chaos that must be brought under Islamic control to bring peace. It justified the initial Arab conquests of the Byzantine and Persian empires which, in another context, were nothing more than imperial and colonialist conquests similar to those that had preceded them (see, e.g., the Greeks and Romans) and which succeeded them (see, e.g., the British and the French). It justified conquests of the Arab Muslim kingdoms in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa by the Turks (first the Seljuks and then the Ottomans). It justified the Mughal conquest of much of India. And it justified the wars between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shi’ite Safavid and Qajar Empires.
Discussions about dār al-Islām and dār al-harb are an obsession of the Salafists and those who sympathize with some or many of their aims. But, as Mr. Syed implies, it is not of great concern to the majority of Muslims, who have less esoteric concerns and more basic priorities.
It should have been obvious when suicide bombers or “martyrdom operations” started in the early 1980s against Israeli, U.S., and then other Western targets (and which started out as a Shi’ite weapon before it was later adopted by Sunni Muslim extremists) that it would eventually — and inevitably — be turned against fellow Muslims. Of course, those “fellow Muslims” would be regarded as “heretics” or “apostates” or “collaborators” — so they weren’t really “fellow Muslims.” It’s a problem when theology is turned into ideology.
Finally — just so you don’t forget — my point in posting this article was to bring to my readers’ attention an example of a Muslim naysayer — and not an obscure one — to the violence that is going on in the Muslim world, and the growing realization — as exemplified by the Grand Mufti of Mecca's hajj sermon, that the djinn (genie) must be put back in the bottle before it destroys the Muslim world. There is a great danger when we generalize — that includes what I have written here.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Traitor, Bomber, Soldier, Spy (and my comments)
Stop crying "terrorism" every time we're attacked.
By William Saletan
Slate.com
January 11, 2010
Two weeks ago, a Jordanian suicide bomber blew up seven CIA employees at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. The CIA called it a "terrorist attack." So did the Associated Press in a report published in dozens of news outlets. Other journalists, analysts, commentators, and TV news anchors followed suit. In a Washington Post op-ed published yesterday, CIA Director Leon Panetta said of the fallen officers, "When you are fighting terrorists, there will be risks."
Terrorists? No, sir. The bombing of the CIA base, like the November massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, was an act of war. It was also espionage. But it wasn't terrorism. Terrorism targets civilians. The CIA officers killed at the Afghan base, like the soldiers shot down at Fort Hood, were not civilians. They were running a war.
According to the U.S. Code (Title 22, Chapter 38, Section 2656f), "the term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." That's the definition we apply to other countries when we designate them as state sponsors of terrorism.
The Sept. 11 attacks, which used planes full of civilians to hit the World Trade Center, fit this definition. So did the attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. So did the Taliban's 2008 bombing of a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan.
The Afghan base bombing doesn't fit the pattern. The CIA personnel who died in the attack were combatants. In interviews with multiple newspapers and wire services — for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here — U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that the personnel at the Afghan base were closely engaged in selecting drone targets in Pakistan and orchestrating special-operations attacks on the Taliban-allied Haqqani network. In the Afghan theater, the CIA is becoming a paramilitary agency. It runs our drone war in Pakistan, and the Afghan base struck on Dec. 30 is "a targeting center for Predator strikes and other operations inside Pakistan."
That's why the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, targeted the base. Read the accounts of his will and his farewell video. "This is a message to the enemies of the [Islamic nation], to the Jordanian intelligence and the CIA," he says in the video. "We will never forget the blood of our Emir Baitullah Mehsud." He vows to "retaliate" for the death of Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban boss who was killed in August by a CIA drone strike. In his will, al-Balawi reportedly names other militants blown away by the agency's unmanned aerial vehicles. He wants to kill the drone masters.
And because the officers at the Afghan base were drone masters, they let him in. He was offering them hot intelligence on Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's deputy leader. They hoped his information would lead them to al-Zawahiri. They were going to do to al-Zawahiri what they'd done to other al-Qaida commanders: wipe him from the face of the earth. If they'd been ordinary intelligence analysts, they never would have whisked al-Balawi into their base for an urgent meeting. They did it, and they died, because they were fighting a war.
Al-Balawi was a jihadist. He wrote nasty, crazy stuff about martyrdom and killing Americans. But those were just words. He was, as one terrorism expert put it, a "cyber-activist." Presumably, that's one reason the CIA took a chance on him: He had never actually tried to kill anybody.
Well, now he has. But his victims weren't civilians. Neither were the victims of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. Read the job titles of the Fort Hood casualties: major, sergeant, captain, specialist, specialist, sergeant, private, private, captain, private, lieutenant, private. Then check out the video of Hasan calmly buying coffee at a 7-Eleven before the shooting. He didn't target civilians. He targeted soldiers.
Within days of the Fort Hood massacre, everybody and his brother was calling Hasan a terrorist. As Slate's Juliet Lapidos noted, even Sen. Joe Lieberman and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who should know better, said it was terrorism. Lieberman cited evidence "that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act."
Therefore? You mean, anybody who kills anybody in the name of Islamic extremism is a terrorist? If that's all we mean by terrorism, then our enemies are right: It's just a code word for people whose religion we don't like.
This isn't what we meant by terrorism when we went to war against it. But one of war's perils is forgetting your principles. You torture, you lie, you change the meaning of your commitments. You win the war by losing your bearings.
Al-Balawi's father understands what terrorism means. Two days ago, he said of his dead son, "Had he killed innocent civilians I would have denounced him." But his son hadn't done that. He had killed intelligence agents. And the fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the father argued, was "a war of intelligence agencies."
He's right about that. In the skies over Pakistan, our agents have the means to incinerate al-Balawi's masters. And I hope they succeed.
But imagine the reverse scenario: an armada of Afghan drones hunting American militia leaders in the United States. Would you retaliate by slaughtering Afghan civilians? Or would you identify the drone masters, infiltrate their intelligence network, and kill them? Does it matter which path you choose?
It certainly does. And if we can't tell the difference anymore — if we need lessons in the meaning of terrorism from the father of a suicide bomber — then it's time to remind ourselves what we're fighting for.
Mark says:
We need to be more careful in how we use language — although I'm not going to hold my breath that that's going to happen anytime soon, if ever.
One way we should take care is to not label or characterize attacks on military targets as "terrorism." And yet...
I know, in some quarters, all enemy targets are "military" targets, "by definition," simply because they are occupied or used by "the enemy." And in other quarters, the enemy, "by definition," are terrorists and everything they do are acts of terrorism.
When combatants hide or position themselves and their equipment among civilian populations while engaging in fighting, is that an act of terrorism? Or are the attacks of their opponents on those combatants hiding among civilians, and which cause civilian casualties, acts of terrorism? It's easy to make judgment calls sitting behind a desk or watching TV but it's much harder when you're in the combat zone and bullets, mortar shells, and RPGs are flying around you.
Although the times and circumstances were different, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was called many things — including infamy and treachery — but never terrorism, because it was an attack against a military target. I don't think anyone is going to go back and relabel it either.
Maj. Nidal Hassan did not commit an act of terrorism — he committed, inter alia, high treason and murder. He will be tried by court martial in a military court and, if found guilty of those charges, he will be subject to the death penalty under military law.
By William Saletan
Slate.com
January 11, 2010
Two weeks ago, a Jordanian suicide bomber blew up seven CIA employees at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan. The CIA called it a "terrorist attack." So did the Associated Press in a report published in dozens of news outlets. Other journalists, analysts, commentators, and TV news anchors followed suit. In a Washington Post op-ed published yesterday, CIA Director Leon Panetta said of the fallen officers, "When you are fighting terrorists, there will be risks."
Terrorists? No, sir. The bombing of the CIA base, like the November massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, was an act of war. It was also espionage. But it wasn't terrorism. Terrorism targets civilians. The CIA officers killed at the Afghan base, like the soldiers shot down at Fort Hood, were not civilians. They were running a war.
According to the U.S. Code (Title 22, Chapter 38, Section 2656f), "the term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents." That's the definition we apply to other countries when we designate them as state sponsors of terrorism.
The Sept. 11 attacks, which used planes full of civilians to hit the World Trade Center, fit this definition. So did the attempt to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. So did the Taliban's 2008 bombing of a hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan.
The Afghan base bombing doesn't fit the pattern. The CIA personnel who died in the attack were combatants. In interviews with multiple newspapers and wire services — for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here — U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that the personnel at the Afghan base were closely engaged in selecting drone targets in Pakistan and orchestrating special-operations attacks on the Taliban-allied Haqqani network. In the Afghan theater, the CIA is becoming a paramilitary agency. It runs our drone war in Pakistan, and the Afghan base struck on Dec. 30 is "a targeting center for Predator strikes and other operations inside Pakistan."
That's why the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, targeted the base. Read the accounts of his will and his farewell video. "This is a message to the enemies of the [Islamic nation], to the Jordanian intelligence and the CIA," he says in the video. "We will never forget the blood of our Emir Baitullah Mehsud." He vows to "retaliate" for the death of Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban boss who was killed in August by a CIA drone strike. In his will, al-Balawi reportedly names other militants blown away by the agency's unmanned aerial vehicles. He wants to kill the drone masters.
And because the officers at the Afghan base were drone masters, they let him in. He was offering them hot intelligence on Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's deputy leader. They hoped his information would lead them to al-Zawahiri. They were going to do to al-Zawahiri what they'd done to other al-Qaida commanders: wipe him from the face of the earth. If they'd been ordinary intelligence analysts, they never would have whisked al-Balawi into their base for an urgent meeting. They did it, and they died, because they were fighting a war.
Al-Balawi was a jihadist. He wrote nasty, crazy stuff about martyrdom and killing Americans. But those were just words. He was, as one terrorism expert put it, a "cyber-activist." Presumably, that's one reason the CIA took a chance on him: He had never actually tried to kill anybody.
Well, now he has. But his victims weren't civilians. Neither were the victims of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. Read the job titles of the Fort Hood casualties: major, sergeant, captain, specialist, specialist, sergeant, private, private, captain, private, lieutenant, private. Then check out the video of Hasan calmly buying coffee at a 7-Eleven before the shooting. He didn't target civilians. He targeted soldiers.
Within days of the Fort Hood massacre, everybody and his brother was calling Hasan a terrorist. As Slate's Juliet Lapidos noted, even Sen. Joe Lieberman and former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who should know better, said it was terrorism. Lieberman cited evidence "that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist and, therefore, that this was a terrorist act."
Therefore? You mean, anybody who kills anybody in the name of Islamic extremism is a terrorist? If that's all we mean by terrorism, then our enemies are right: It's just a code word for people whose religion we don't like.
This isn't what we meant by terrorism when we went to war against it. But one of war's perils is forgetting your principles. You torture, you lie, you change the meaning of your commitments. You win the war by losing your bearings.
Al-Balawi's father understands what terrorism means. Two days ago, he said of his dead son, "Had he killed innocent civilians I would have denounced him." But his son hadn't done that. He had killed intelligence agents. And the fight in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the father argued, was "a war of intelligence agencies."
He's right about that. In the skies over Pakistan, our agents have the means to incinerate al-Balawi's masters. And I hope they succeed.
But imagine the reverse scenario: an armada of Afghan drones hunting American militia leaders in the United States. Would you retaliate by slaughtering Afghan civilians? Or would you identify the drone masters, infiltrate their intelligence network, and kill them? Does it matter which path you choose?
It certainly does. And if we can't tell the difference anymore — if we need lessons in the meaning of terrorism from the father of a suicide bomber — then it's time to remind ourselves what we're fighting for.
Mark says:
We need to be more careful in how we use language — although I'm not going to hold my breath that that's going to happen anytime soon, if ever.
One way we should take care is to not label or characterize attacks on military targets as "terrorism." And yet...
I know, in some quarters, all enemy targets are "military" targets, "by definition," simply because they are occupied or used by "the enemy." And in other quarters, the enemy, "by definition," are terrorists and everything they do are acts of terrorism.
When combatants hide or position themselves and their equipment among civilian populations while engaging in fighting, is that an act of terrorism? Or are the attacks of their opponents on those combatants hiding among civilians, and which cause civilian casualties, acts of terrorism? It's easy to make judgment calls sitting behind a desk or watching TV but it's much harder when you're in the combat zone and bullets, mortar shells, and RPGs are flying around you.
Although the times and circumstances were different, the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor was called many things — including infamy and treachery — but never terrorism, because it was an attack against a military target. I don't think anyone is going to go back and relabel it either.
Maj. Nidal Hassan did not commit an act of terrorism — he committed, inter alia, high treason and murder. He will be tried by court martial in a military court and, if found guilty of those charges, he will be subject to the death penalty under military law.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
